The image of Aylan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned on September 2, 2015, as he tried to cross the Mediterranean with his family to seek safety in Europe, may ﬁnally shock Europe and the world into offering greater protection to refugees fleeing from war and persecution in Syria and elsewhere. Aylan's death was a tragedy of a kind that has become all too familiar. In 2015 alone, thousands of people have died trying to reach European shores in unseaworthy, overcrowded boats. Many of those who drowned were children—including in a single instance an estimated one hundred children (out of a total of some eight hundred fatalities) lost in a shipwreck off the coast of Libya in April.

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